Educational Journey into CMS – starting with Joomla!

January 2010 Design Challenge

Well, here is my attempt to keep my New Year’s Resolution to challenge myself to design something for 15-30 minutes a day. Look! There are places to fill in the future….hope that keeps me working!

Today I had the idea to recreate a feeling, ‘Peaceful’ and place it in a banner format. I used the long neglected pen tool and lots of fun layers in PhotoShop. I had the drawing and colors done in 15 minutes, but played for another 20 minutes with the sunrays until I noticed that they could be rain! Wow – I hadn’t intended a storm, but there ya go! The storm clouds, mountains and all need work – I am just excited I started something new!

Storms a-brewin'

I had an impression to do a puffy cloud word hope as if the clouds were pulling away from a blowing bubble hoop….INSTEAD I got a flower power owl face….started with a pen vector drawing then transformed shapes in PS CS3.

Hope with wings turns into an owl

Hope ends in E

I had big plans to animate a caption, and it took me more than 30 minutes to review a Flash video, and then play with 2 of 6 letters I intended to use. Well…I need to pick up the pace, and this is part of my practice. I intended to give these a metallic look, but will have to go through my tutorials and review them. This is as far as I got. I plan on doing more with this soon – making more of an anchor inside the outlined letter U and a bow-tie in the letter S. I also wanted to note my background was from a wonderful site of free personal and commercial use Webtreats – PhotoShop overlays.

The U.S. part of a caption designing in PhotoShop CS3 with pen tool

The Web Design Challenge Forum has been a great source of encouragement and ideas! Also, I noticed my blog analytics have increased with folks jumping to this site! What a bonus! One of the artists asked if I had considered trying to distort pink bows for the Breast Cancer site I am going to start this year. I never thought of it before (Thank you jhoodfysh!) but started playing with it here for todays 30 minute creative moment.

Hope Bows

Lesson – stop while you are ahead, divert to something else and return to this idea when you have more enthusiasm! This was more play like yesterdays attempt, but didn’t really pan out as well. I have a better idea for this word, but thought I would see if I could carry yesterday’s theme over…..and it didn’t turn out as well. This is an overlay teal color using dissolve and about 60 percent opacity over a layer of black for the background. Letters are distorted pink bows from the Photoshop CS3 shapes directory.

Stop while you are ahead, and have faith that something better will work in the end.

Today I only had 15 minutes, and was able to use PhotoShop CS3 shapes and a gradient background to dash this one out. Of course, I started thinking about having these notes spill out of the top of the ribbon hoop…..like bubbles, or like a rainbow spilling notes out from the loop opening down onto the scale background….so this was no where near my idea. It was, however something I never thought about until I started playing around.

Heal me quickly

Another 30 minute project where I learned that time could have been saved if I had all of my images in one folder instead of scattered – even though I had made a concerted effort to keep them together – the one I wanted to use is still alluding me, so these two were trials. The font is a bit hard to read, and I don’t like giving too much opacity fade to the glorious fabric colors behind the font, so hours were spent instead of minutes, and I am still not satisfied!

5 Hearts Quilts with Flippit

5 Hearts logo with flannel

I spent some time reviewing ideas for logos, and many tutorials such as this one creating a helicopter logo using a hummingbird where step by step thoughts and research were revealed. To simplify a concept is not the easiest thing to do. I wanted to portray a mirror since this is a beauty salon logo, but didn’t want too feminine of a look…hence the frame outline, but that might be too much to expect of a logo, and more to expect of a banner. I doubt the bevel will look that great on a logo – probably simplifying it further to just include a color would be best, but I still liked the look. I only spent 30 minutes with this after spending days marveling at how other folks simplify a concept. This is a wonderful challenge!

Simplest logo

Logo with Mirror outline

I worked on this idea trying to display a mirror….I received some great input to soften the blue so it would be easier on the eyes…..tomorrow! For now, I played with background textures and the mirror. I am not sure I like the slant to the mirror, because I feel that every font should slant the same direction. I played with a large first letter, and settled on these two ideas.

X Marks the spot

Stars, but does the word Image stand out as part of the shop name?

Today I just had to play, and even though there are some odd background figures leftover from the beginning, the outcome of playing with a font called florilia – using the letter A (doubled, reversing one on top of the other then duplicating, offsetting into a zig zag – oh yes, then flipping 90 degrees for the other side) was fun. Also used a PhotoShop Brush I obtained – a beautiful bamboo and orchid frame from Lileya of DeviantArt that I added 8 layers of different opacity and colors to. The needlework font is called Home Sweet Home all in PhotoShop. I came across a tutorial Lileya suggested that turns photos into PhotoShop Brushes from Scully7491 – PS Brush tutorial on DeviantArt.